I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. After beating up 35,000 people, maybe they finally get it. Looks like the remedies from now on will be to alert the ISP, with the ISP telling the user to stop.

That's a nice Christmas present from the RIAA! Could it be that the RIAA's reign of terror is over?

It was out of control for the RIAA surely, the lawsuits weren't deterring people. They had to wake up sooner or later that the internet is the new medium for transferring digital media. What they need to do is promote services like iTunes (which is my primary source for music now probably), and make them cheaper so more people adopt them.

Make it cheap and easy to use, and people will flock to it. I think a lot of people would be happy to pay a small fee for music - $30 for a CD is stupid, even $18 (which is becoming more and more common in Australia) is over the top... but it is evidence of the industry taking steps in the right direction.

I think there are two driving factors in the decision. One, that the RIAA is finding their litigation carpet-bombing to be counter-productive, and two, that it's easier for them to shift the burden of enforcement to the ISPs. The RIAA will still be hiring research companies to monitor P2P traffic. Except now they will merely dispatch letters to the ISPs rather than go the settlement/litigation route. The costs to the RIAA are much lower this way, and the ISP has to do the dirty work. I think this decision was purely economic, and not a mea culpa by the record industry.

How this plays out to the P2P user who gets busted depends on the reaction of their ISP. The consequences could range from a warning notice from the ISP saying "knock it off," to BW throttling, all the way up to termination of the account. Still, a lot less painful than having to fork over a couple grand.

I don't have any details yet on the case and what went wrong. But Thomas went from suffering a 200K damage award against her in the first trial, to 1.92 million in damages in this one. About $80,000 for each song she allegedly shared. We'll have to wait and see what happens on appeal.

Thinking about file-sharing? Don't. You'll get fined, and crime doesn't pay (unless you rob banks and/or armored cars, then it pays very well). Take it from Jammie Thomas, who was fined $2 million for downloading 24 songs, or anyone else who tried to fight the RIAA.

... Since March 2004, over 12,200,000 warnings have been sent out to those using WinMX to violate copyright. The WinMX software employed to upload files without rights holders' permission is a peer-to-peer file-sharing program authored by Frontcode Technologies.

I thought this was interesting, as I never thought it affected anyone using WinMX.

A group within the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed 20000 lawsuits against American bittorrent users for either supplying or downloading copyrighted materials. Another 30 000 lawsuits will be filed this week. The suits are being filed by the US Copyright Group which represents several small film making companies. The group used a german firm, Guardaley IT to track the spread of 5 recent films (considered generally to be box office flops) across the bittorrent system. Guardaley IT specializes in tracking network file transfers. The films in question are:1. Steam Experiment2. Far Cry3. Uncross the stars4. Gray Man5. Call of the Wild (3D)Those summoned to court will be able to pay a fee in order to have the case dropped.

"We are not your enemy and we want to help," Schmidt told the crowd at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Not coincidentally, the company announced the day before that Google TV would soon be launching in Europe, starting with the UK.

mmm.. well put. I guess no news is good news and, given that there's no news here we should just accept it as good news.Actually, for those that use twitter, there's always news on this topic. In fact, there's so much of it that it would be pretty hard to keep up with it here. I guess we could put in a little effort and post some of it though, eh?